Beyond Consensus

Does consensus serve as a sufficient legitimation of knowledge? 

 

This question pertains to today’s debates because debaters sometimes posit consensus as a criterion for truth or even as a reason to end the debate.  Sometimes these debates surround questions where scientists, historians, or other experts conclude disproportionately on one side of the debate (or appear to do so).  Debates over global warming, consequences of vaccinations, and Shakespearian authorship come to mind.[i]

 

Of course consensus does not equal truth: one cannot logically conclude from a general or even a universal agreement about a proposition that the said proposition is true or false.  What everybody knows may be dead wrong, and as Joseph Sobran notes, “often what ‘everybody knows’ today is directly opposite to what ‘everybody knew’ a generation earlier.”[ii]  Sobran observes that we often repeat what everybody knows without really knowing what we are repeating.  We repeat without understanding.  We repeat without having a real basis for repeating other than the fact (or fiction) of consensus.

 

Consensus as a criterion for legitimation or validation has become more suspect in the postmodern age.  Postmodernists such as Jean-François Lyotard depict the scientist as operating within imaginative linguistic narratives.  Like everyone else, the scientist is a teller of stories, but one “duty bound to verify them.”[iii]  Like every other storyteller in the postmodern age, the scientist does not have recourse to the grand narratives, but only to the little narratives that allow room for paralogy, dissent, undecidables, catastrophes, conflicts of interpretation, unknowability, and disagreement about the meaning and method of science. 

 

For Lyotard, consensus is “only a particular state of discussion, not its end.”[iv]    In making consensus the end of discussion, we risk making consensus – the communal story – into a grand narrative, a narrative that violently totalizes, that offers no hospitality to other narratives and no room for paralogy or difference.  Positing consensus as a reason to end the debate closes us off to the generation of new ideas and what might actually be the truth.[v] 

 

When consensus is popularized, the fact of consensus supplants knowledge of what the consensus concerns:  the agreed upon conclusions join the endlessly repeated and little understood body of what everybody knows. 

 

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[i] Consensus also plays a legitimizing role in the processes of democracy and trial by jury.  Democracies imply a trust in the democratic process: justice will be reached through the political process of deliberation and discussion.  Our legal system presupposes a basic faith that consensus among the jurors will correspond to the guilt or innocence of the accused. 

[ii] http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060914.shtml

[iii] The Postmodern Condition, 60

[iv] 65

[v] Politicians eager to enact their policies may look to consensus as reason to move forward in the enactment, and while political policies need not have certain knowledge as their basis to be prudent policies, the politicians and the public should maintain a healthy skepticism of the consensus or, at the very least, an openness to alternative conclusions that may call into the question the prudence of a political policy. 

Deconstructing Nine Eleven

Shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Giovanna Borradori interviewed leading philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida on what they thought to be the significance of the event.  The interviews were published along with Borradori’s commentary in a short book called Philosophy in a Time of Terror.  The book offers two very different evaluations of the event of 9/11 from the two contemporary but antagonistic thinkers. 

 

Unsurprisingly, Jacques Derrida directed our attention to the “phenomenon of language, naming, and dating” and to the compulsion to repetition.[i]  Speaking of 9/11, he said:

 

“Something” took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the “thing.”  But this very thing, the place and meaning of this “event,” remains ineffable, like an intuition without a concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about.  We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11.  The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity.  The telegram of this metonymy—a name, a number—points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize, that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.[ii]

 

Derrida saw as significant the naming of the “event” as a date.  No name could do justice to or even hint at the fullness of what occurred that day.  No name could capture the complete historical context of the attacks, nor the shock and sorrow, the loss of life, the grief and agony, the murderous intent and the responses of heroism.   There is much we will never know and for which we’ll never have a name.  That being said, the name “chosen” through its repetition was “9/11,” “September 11,” a date.  A name identifies what something is and excludes what it is not according the name.  The name “September 11” would at first seem to include all such dates in time and exclude the 364 other days in the year.  It’s a date that occurred before and has occurred after the attacks on that day, yet unless that date holds other special significance for someone, its naming probably brings to mind first and foremost that horrific event.  The question is, why name the event with the day it happened?  That is a question Derrida encouraged us to ponder.

 

Borradori provided an answer:

 

Referring to an event with a date automatically gives it historical stature: it monumentalizes it.  Naming the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon “9/11” alleviates the sense of responsibility for the failure to prevent them as well as the sense of vulnerability that such failure inevitably provokes.[iii]

 

In other words, the naming of the event “9/11” isolates the meaning of the event within the boundaries established by that name, stresses the significance of the event as contained within those boundaries, and decreases or dismisses the significance of what is excluded from those boundaries.  The naming and repetition of the name without asking what is named obscures the full meaning of the event:  repetition without reflection traps one in the name, in the construct, in this case, a construct that conceals more than it reveals.  Derrida cautioned against the entrapment of language, calling us “to understand what is going on precisely beyond language and what is pushing us to repeat endlessly and without knowing what we are talking about, precisely there where language and the concept come up against their limits: ‘September 11, September 11, le 11 septembre, 9/11.’”[iv]

 

Derrida deconstructed the name “9/11” in order to open the name (and us who use it) to that which occurred beyond the name.  An endless and thoughtless repetition of “9/11” hinders our understanding of the event.    Granted, Borradori’s interview with Derrida happened mere weeks following the terrorist attacks, when historians, politicians, pundits and others were still just beginning to compose narratives explaining it.  Nevertheless, the repetition (without knowing) of “9/11” continued and continues to this day.  Moreover, the name served as the basis of other linguistic expressions endlessly repeated and little reflected upon.

 

In December of 2003, the Vice President gave political stature to one of these expressions: “9/11 changed everything.”  He clarified the hyperbolic statement: “9/11 forced us to think in new ways about threats to the United States, about our vulnerabilities, about who our enemies were, about what kind of military strategy we needed in order to defend ourselves.”  The other oft repeated expression, hyperbolic in its own way, is that we now live in a “post-9/11 world.”  This expression builds upon the monumentalizing effect of “9/11” by categorizing world history into that which came before and that which came after 9/11,  establishing a framework by which we understand the event in history—and history itself.  The name “post-9/11 world” raises 9/11 to the level of historical significance of, say, the industrial revolution or modernity; “post-9/11 world” joins the expressions “post-modern” and “post-industrial” as signifiers of major historical division and categorization, markers in a historical framework.  The name “post-9/11 world” could indicate 9/11 as the marker.  After all, it changed everything.

 

The repetition of “9/11 changed everything” and “post-9/11 world,” rather than spur serious thought on how to respond appropriately to the attacks, brings thought and conversation concerning our response to a halt.  Practices deemed out of bounds, torture for instance, have found defenders who repeat the statement “9/11 changed everything” as justification for such practices.  Is torture morally wrong?  Illegal?  Irrelevant.  9/11 changed everything.  In a post-9/11 world, we have to keep ourselves safe by whatever means necessary.  Repetition takes the place of argument.

 

If we do not know what we are saying or naming by the repetition of “9/11” or “September 11,” and if we do not know what we are talking about in that naming and repetition, then our responses may not even be responding to the event itself (albeit as understood as mediated through language). They may be responses to an isolating linguistic expression constructed by the naming and repetition of 9/11, or extensions of that construction.  To the extent that we move from thinking to action, when we act in response to “9/11,” we act in response to “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns,” to use the telling terms of Donald Rumsfeld.  It would not be a stretch to say that, in so far as we remain trapped in that name, we don’t know what we are doing or whether what we are doing will be beneficial or disastrous.

 

 

 

 

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[i] 87

[ii] 86

[iii] 148

[iv] 87

On Constructing Reality

A Sketch

 

We cannot know reality as it is in itself because our experience of reality, through which we come to know reality, is mediated by language.  As an object of our experience and a content of our knowledge, reality is a product of the functions of linguistic mediation. 

 

By using a word as a signifier, we identify the object signified as one thing and not another.  A word establishes distinguishing boundaries, revealing what is contained within and concealing what resides without.  Words used together construct meaningful structures and frameworks, and these more complex structures and frameworks also establish boundaries that reveal and conceal the signified objects.

 

The linguistic function of establishing boundaries begins not after the experience of an object but rather prior to the experience.  The object which we experience, reality included, is not immediately present to us, for the functioning of linguistic signs grants us passage to and mediates our encounter with that object.  Language is already functioning at the start of our experience of reality.[i] 

 

Say I am exploring a cave and come upon some writing on the cavern walls; I might say that I first encountered the writing when I first perceived it and that language comes into play following the initial perception of the writing on the wall.  After seeing the writing on the wall, I can then formulate in language an expression indicative of this perception of writing.  Language, however, functions not only at this stage in the experience: following the perception; it makes the perception possible in the first place.  Language functions prior to the perception.

 

In order for me to perceive the writing upon the wall I have to have in my mind some concept, however vague or precise, of writing.  If I possess no such concept, then I will not see writing, but instead something else, perhaps markings on the wall.  But for that perception of markings to occur, I would need to have some concept in my mind of markings.  Whenever we perceive a thing, we perceive it as something, as it fits into the boundaries established by our language.[ii]  What fits inside the framework may be revealed to us; what lies outside will be concealed from us.

 

Given this, we might still be able to know reality as it is in itself in so far as reality fit into the boundaries established by the words of our philosophical constructs; however, while the signified may be revealed in the signifier, the revelation within the boundaries is not transparent. 

 

A professor of mine remarked that if you want to understand a philosopher, study his metaphors.  Metaphors, and more generally figurative and symbolic language, are a fundamental component in the constructed frameworks by which we understand reality.  In addition, words bearing literal significance are fashioned in and inseparable from their historical and cultural birth and functioning.  Language lives by the blood of history and culture, time and place.  Whereas figurative language creates meaning, all language rooted in historical and cultural significance produces meaning, in so far as the meanings of words are marked by the world in which they were born and live.  To speak metaphorically, they radiate the colors the age; they emit the scents of their times and places.  They are not transparent windows through which we see the things themselves as they really are.   The window is not so open that we can smell the natural fragrance with no artificial scent added: the window frame has its own scent that is added to that of reality.  The window glass is stained, revealing and concealing the picture beyond, and adding to and subtracting from what we see. 

 

The mediations of language, which give us access to reality, function beyond setting boundaries.  Reality, in so far as we know it by means of language is in a way a product of language.  The reality that we know, that our philosophical acts pursue, we in truth partially produce.  The natural is in a sense artificial.  The philosophical realist, either metaphysical or phenomenological, should consider that language mediates – indeed, shapes – our perception and interpretation of reality, whether that reality is formulated in terms of “forms,” “being,” “essence,” or the “things-themselves.”  “Every time metaphysics takes a stab at determining ‘Being,’ it comes up with some sort of being (substance, form, will, mind, etc.),” writes John D. Caputo in Radical Hermeneutics.[iii] 

 

W. Norris Clarke, S.J., a Thomistic metaphysician and far more conservative than Caputo, agrees that “the conceptual-linguistic expression of what [metaphysicians] have discovered will always have to resign itself to being incomplete, falling short of the fullness of the real, in a word, perspectival, seen from within the resources of thinking, speaking, imagining, and feeling of the metaphysicians own culture in its situation in human history.”[iv]  

 

The mediations of language do not condemn the philosopher to an absolute relativism, which denies that we can know reality.  These mediations merely mean that we cannot know reality as it is in itself, not that we cannot know reality.  Whereas realism assumes that our ideas correspond to the way things are, relativism assumes that no such correspondence exists.  Relativism denies the correspondence between our ideas and reality, throwing the correspondence theory of truth to the wind.  The functions of language here described mean that any such correspondence is not one-to-one.

That said, the correspondence theory of truth takes a hit from the functioning of linguistic mediations.  No one has a pure, unmediated access to reality.  No one sees reality as it is in itself, nor knows it as such.  Rather, what we each see and know, if reality is really the object of our perception and knowledge, is in a way a product of our making, a social construct, if you will.  The correspondence theory of truth says that a proposition’s truth is determined by whether or not it corresponds to reality, but no one can fully test that correspondence.  Reality as it is in itself lies ahead of our experience, ahead our perception, ahead our interpretation, ahead our knowledge.  We test a statement not by reality itself free of our subjectivity, but by what we know of reality; and what we know of reality we have perceived and understood, but also produced and constructed.   

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[i] Caputo, John D., Radical Hermeneutics, 136.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid, 178.

[iv] Clarke, W. Norris, The One and the Many, 7.